Adobe is fond of referring to certain features as "Photoshop magic," or simple tools that make complex processes simpler. Many of these “magical” features begin as experiments in the company’s labs.

Each year at the Adobe Max creativity conference, the closing "Sneaks" session shows off some of the most promising experiments from the labs. Certain projects never make it beyond the stage, but others — like the camera shake reduction and perspective warp tools — become integral parts of Adobe products.

This year, actor and director Joseph Gordon-Levitt took the stage with Adobe’s senior director Ben Forta to introduce the company’s most exciting experiments. Here's a look at some of the highlights (and crowd favorites) from the session on Tuesday night.

Project Layup

Project Layup takes advantage of Adobe’s newly launched Creative SDK, which allows third party developers to build apps that are able to tap into Adobe’s Creative Cloud platform.

The tablet app is for designers who want to quickly mock up designs and sketch out layout ideas. It uses gesture based controls — a swipe to the right inserts a line of “Lorem ipsum” placeholder text — and preserves a timeline of your progress so you can go back and view the evolution of your design. Projects can also be exported as full Photoshop or InDesign files when you’re ready to move over to desktop.

Visual Speech Editor

Visual Speech Editor is a new take on audio editing. While waveforms can be helpful, they do little when editors are trying to track speech patterns, which still requires listening to entire audio clips. This tool is a kind of combination between text to speech and traditional waveforms; the result is a simple way to edit audio and clearly see speech patterns without listening to the whole recording.

Defog

While existing tools within Photoshop allow you to remove haze from outdoor shots, they usually don't do so effectively (one part of a photo may improve while another gets worse). The process is also fairly tedious and time consuming.

Time of Day

Photographers often talk about a “golden hour” when light is just right. But capturing the right photo at these elusive times leaves photos to the whims of nature. Time of Day uses an algorithm to automatically calculate what the lighting would be at any given time of day for a particular photo, according to Adobe. Its creator said more than 400 time lapse videos were recorded, and the team studied how light and colors change throughout the day.

Project Para

Project Para, created by one of Adobe’s visiting interns, uses math to help artists automatically create patterns and illustrations. The software is open source and available now.

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#ProjectPara uses algorithms to help artists automatically make illustrations

Other projects include a new Photoshop workspace optimized for designers, software to automatically smooth out and remove jump cuts in videos, and a browser-based version of Photoshop.

The future of the experimental projects is up in the air and Adobe says much will depend on public response. The company is encouraging people to tweet about the ones they feel most strongly about to give the projects a better shot at making it into future software. Head over to the Max blog to see videos of all the projects that were demoed.

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